Heather Salt, an amateur fossil hunter from Solihull near Birmingham, said she travelled down to Lyme Regis in hopes of finding something for her own collection.<\/p>\n
“I really just wanted to find a little ammonite,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It was by where there’s an old dump eroding onto the beach, and there’s lots of bits of metal, so I looked down and thought it was nails stuck into something.”<\/p>\n
But when she picked it up and realised it was stone, she started to become suspicious.<\/p>\n
“I went and showed it to Casey [the guide] and he got so excited and he just said – ‘are you kidding me!’ and he was calling everyone over to have a look.”<\/p>\n
“After, I said to Casey: ‘Well, I just wanted to find a little ammonite.”<\/p>\n
“He said: ‘I would trade you my entire collection of ammonites for that.'”<\/p>\n
Before leaving, she was found by the museum’s geology curator, Dr Paul Davis. <\/p>\n
“He came rushing over and he got so excited and he said, ‘that’s croc!'”<\/p>\n
She said after she learned how important the find was, she was happy to donate it to the museum. <\/p>\n
“I did find my own little ammonite in the end which was what I really wanted.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heather Salt, an amateur fossil hunter from Solihull near Birmingham, said she travelled down to Lyme Regis in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-411493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}